A Trail of Butterflies
by Indie Tangles
Summary: She calls it 'accidental magic' now, just like everyone else. A HUFFLEPUFF STORY. Hardly any canon bending; plenty interhouse brohood; everyday life at Hogarts; IC!Snape and Burbage as favorite teachers. Did I mention Hufflepuffs?


**A NOTE: I write for myself, which means I write things I'd like to see in fanon. So, a sampling of things to come, that I think are underwritten: the butt-of-every-joke house, and the house of nerds; inter house friendships; Luna; Muggle Studies; everyday life at Hogwarts; muggle-born adaptation. Um, for a start. Ha. I'm writing an OC, but I don't plan on interfering with canon couples, even the ones I hate, although there will be canon involvement. My OC, hopefully, is likable, but if you don't like them on general principal, get out now. :) Also, this is a prologue; the next chapter goes back to the beginning; first year. Thank for your time. **

**Also, I don't own Harry Potter. Obvy. **

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From the time she was very young, miracles followed Adelaide Cooper like a trail of butterflies. Of course, when she turned eleven and received her letter from Hogwarts, her worldveiw shifted, causing her to look back on her early childhood with her enlightened, _grown-up_ glasses on.

She still considers the first one she remembers a _miracle,_ of course, although she calls the rest "bursts of accidental magic" like everyone else now.

She wrote the first essay in her Introduction to Magic class (with a ballpoint pen) on the incident. _It was the middle of summer, in 1985,_ she'd scrawled_, and my big sister Matilda was up in the biggest tree on the grounds. The crazy thing is, I couldn't tell you what I ate yesterday, but I don't think I'll never forget how damp the grass was, and how the moisture crept up through our picnic blanket, and the sticky cold mud between my fingers as my cousin Caleb and I built a mucky, weed-filled sandcastle..._

Matilda was nine, and perched up in the old oak tree, caused fat droplets of water to drip from the branches when she moved.

"Tilly," Adelaide had started to complain, not looking up from the grass she was pulling to top their mudcastle at the exact same moment Caleb screamed.

She shouldn't have even had time to look; in the amount of time it took Adelaide to look, she should have been hearing was Tilly's skull cracking against the ground instead of her low whimper; a branch much too thick to have even moved wrapped firmly against her ankle. She had to be cut from it, as the firemen puzzled over how she even got her foot into such a tight loop, not to mention upside down.

Even once she was aware of being a witch, she didn't think she'd saved the day, then. It was over too quickly, and didn't magic have to have _intent_?

It was one of her most vivid childhood memories and she thought about it fairly often, but it took Mrs. Burbage, who was both the Muggle Studies and Introduction to Magic professor, to point out something she hadn't ever thought of.

She'd always treated the incident with respect; not tried to explain it away. She had wondered if some kind of higher power was intervening, or if it was possible her sister's own karma had interfered, but Mrs. Burbage had posed an interesting question in the margins of her essay in Slytherin green ink wedged between "_You have a gift for telling stories, Adelaide_" and "_This paragraph has a whole marathon worth of run-ons_."

_Maybe it was Caleb's magic, and not yours?_ It was a valid question, and she thought about it until she decided it wasn't possible. He would have received his Hogwarts letter, too, years before her. It was just such a good example of everything she loved about her favorite teacher: always insightful, encouraging, so often seeing things from such a different perspective, and good at teaching her to do the same.

As she was one of at least a dozen crying like a baby at her memorial service when she was fifteen, she knew she wasn't the only that had loved her. She wasn't the only one immensely impressed by her mentor's ability to pull her into the fold, into the secret _magician's-only_ secret society of mostly magic-born Hogwarts, or the only one that wanted _heads to roll_.


End file.
